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Recordings

Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert and Schumann songs series for Hyperion are landmarks in the history of recorded music. Now this indefatigable performer and scholar turns to the songs and vocal works of Brahms. Hyperion is delighted to present t ...» More

Following the iconic series of the complete songs of Schubert and Schumann, Graham Johnson’s latest enterprise traverses the complete songs of Brahms. He is joined here on Volume 2 by the wonderful Christine Schäfer, whose contribution to the Schu ...» More

The girl stood, stood by the mountain slope, The mountains reflected her face, And the girl spoke to her face: ‘Truly, my face, O you my sorrow, If I knew, white face of mine, That an old man would one day kiss you, I’d go out to the green mountain, Gather all the wormwood in the mountain, Press the bitter juice from the wormwood, And wash you, O my face, in that juice, That you’d taste bitter when the old man kisses you! But were I to know, white face of mine, That a young man would one day kiss you, I’d go out into the green garden, Pick all the roses in the garden, Press scented water from the roses, Wash you, O face, in the water, That you’d taste sweet when the young man kisses you!’

This is yet another setting from Kapper’s Die Gesänge der Serben where the title is ‘Wüsst ich, Antlitz, wer dich einst wird küssen!’. A young girl considers her possible romantic future by conversing with her own face as if this part of her anatomy had an independent life if its own—simply because it would be the sole recipient of a man’s kisses, whether that man were disgustingly old or deliciously young. She goes on to sing one of the most ageist songs in the Lieder repertoire. Brahms knew what it was to love much younger women (he was far too fond of the young and beautiful Julie Schumann for Clara’s liking) and he must have chuckled at setting this text at the advanced age of fifty—particularly because age difference seems to be one of his enduring preoccupations. The music, in a curious mixture of 3/4 and common time, seems skittish and ill-at-ease: this is a song for a young lady who wheedles and schemes to get what she wants. If she is to be forced to kiss an old man she has a definite plan: like some Germanic Pulcinella she will go into the mountains to gather herbs—in this case wormwood (the German word Wermut is closer to the French vermouth) to make a tincture to put on her face. This will surely put off her would-be ancient suitor who would find kissing her an altogether bitter experience. This plan of action is outlined in the minor key. The change to B major, a delicious softening, betokens a different fantasy—being kissed by a younger man. The strangely disorientated rhythm disappears in favour of a smooth Animato grazioso in 2/4 which is fleet of foot and suddenly charming. The awkward and pouting girl now veritably prances in glee. Staccati in the piano part betoken the joyful picking of roses and legato quavers facilitate her countryside gambol. With newly prepared rosewater her face will be deliciously fragrant for her young suitor, and all is well in the world. The last two lines of the song revert to the 3/4 + 4/4 for the ecstatic peroration and we can almost see and hear her stamping and jumping for sheer joy.

Siegfried Kapper was born in Prague to a Jewish family and became a successful doctor; but he spent his life in travel and in the service of the Slavic languages, mainly translating them into German. Kapper’s period living in Vienna was clouded by his political support for the revolution of 1852. He also translated Serbian into Czech and some of these texts were set to music by Dvorák for his Op 6 songs. Brahms took all his Kapper texts from Gesänge der Serben (1852) published, significantly, by the Leipzig firm of Brockhaus rather than in Austria.

Friedrich Halm (the word means ‘straw’) was the pseudonym of Eligius von Münch-Bellinghausen, a key figure in the literary and theatrical life of mid-nineteenth-century Austria, an aristocrat who rose to powerful positions in the administration of that city’s libraries and theatres, and a playwright with many productions to his credit who was reckoned among the greats of his time. Brahms almost certainly knew Halm as an important figure in Vienna, and his possession of the twelve volumes of the writer’s complete works indicates he was a fan (this poem is to be found in Volume 7, p. 46). Today Halm is a name nobody knows: in Sams’s words he ‘stands on the margin of literature’—a verdict prophesied by Elisabet von Herzogenberg who effectively caused a Brahms song to a Halm poem (Schneegestöber) to be destroyed on the grounds that the text was unworthy of the composer.

Halm was celebrated for his large dramatic structures, but Brahms seems to have been most charmed by the poet’s shorter, mellifluous lyrics. This is a fine example of a text that allows Brahms to create one of his relatively rare songs of almost cloudless enchantment. The fluttering wings that symbolize ‘Gedanken’—the thoughts surrounding the beloved—are perfectly rendered by the happy invention of a piano figuration: a succession of oscillating sixths descending in semiquavers in the right hand are echoed in the left in mirror image. The meshing of this undulating movement between both staves—ponderous or elegant according to the skill of the pianist—underpins a breezy vocal line, one of the composer’s most unselfconscious tunes. The glory of this song is that the composer allows for a moment of tender ‘Sehnsucht’ in this music at ‘Hier litt’ es sie nicht mehr’ (and at ‘Der allerschönste Ort’ in the second verse, a repeat of the first) where the carefree nature of the music is momentarily undermined with a shadow of pain—no more than that, but enough to render the song as a whole something far more subtle than one might first expect. For the third verse the music takes a slightly different turn—the scorched wings of the poem’s closing line, and a ritardando that extends for nine bars, create a mood of wistful resignation. The postlude reworks the music of the opening, but leaping optimism now seems chastened, and once again we realize that the entire song has been written from the standpoint of the outsider rather than from that of the happy, fulfilled lover. But not even this typically Brahmsian twist can turn this song into something tragic and sad; the lover’s smile is what lingers in this music, modified with a sigh, but a smile nevertheless.

For all my efforts, I cannot overcome it, Cannot bear it in my heart That I should see people I know surrounding me Who were unable to make me happy or sad, Whether they left or stayed, While only she should walk away For whose sake I endured all the others.

There are two versions of this song, the second of which is Brahm’s own revision of the first published setting. In the first version the conflict between 3/8 in the vocal line and 2/4 in the accompaniment sets in at bar 41, but in the composer’s second thoughts (as recorded here) it is a feature of the whole song with the exception of the five-bar introduction. The poem is part of the Lieder der Liebe sequence to be found in the first volume of Halm’s Werke (1877, p. 236), and the composer uses only the first of the poet’s three eight-line strophes. This he divides up into four two-line units where the musical shape is AABA. The last two lines of the poem are repeated to make a coda, in fact the A passage is somewhat modified with a ritardando over five bars and a cadential phrase of new material to bring the song to a rousing close. The mood is an unusual one: the song is in the major key and yet the words are spoken (and sung) in a mood of distraction and panic, and minor-key twinges of harmony somehow suggest unhappiness suppressed and hidden from view. The singer is pulled one way and another and the tension generated by the vocal line and accompaniment in different time-signatures is an indication of this stress. The poem clearly had some personal significance for Brahms in that it reflected his own emotions at some time or another. Eric Sams suggests a link with the composer’s relationship with Clara Schumann in an earlier period in his life. It is by no means certain when the song was composed.

The poem of this popular and often-sung song is found in Volume 9 (p. 105) of Halm’s Werke; the lyric, one of two sung by the character Margot, it is part of the dramatic poem Wildfeuer, sketched in 1860. The F major tonality matches Sonntag Op 47 No 1 in the same key and is another example of an art song with many of the characteristics of a folksong, a strictly strophic evocation of an imaginary and idealized rustic Germany—or Switzerland—in days of yore. The four-bar Vorspiel has a hint of a yodel, and more than a hint of thigh-slapping bonhomie. The portrait of the young lady singing this lyric encompasses a hint of boastful pride as well as a remarkable level of tolerance in regard to the hunter’s many other girlfriends. It is a Ländler that might perhaps have been sung (and danced) by the miller-maid in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. This was a beloved work of Brahms and the mention of green in the poem’s second line—the favourite colour of the Schubert heroine—must have rung bells in the composer’s mind. In the Italian rispetti of Heyse’s Italienisches Liederbuch it is often a lady, very much in control of a situation, who delivers the coup de foudre (whereby her hapless male victim is effectively skewered) in the poem’s final line. And so it is here. She has expressed her admiration for the hunter’s physical attributes, but now we also learn how she manages to remain so unconcerned about his other girlfriends: he will get nowhere with her unless he marries her—and we are somehow led to believe by the music (and the ebullient postlude) that she is holding all the cards and that her dangling of a carrot in front of this donkey-in-green will triumphantly succeed. Indeed, the music almost seems to whoop with delight.

On 21 April 1877 Brahms wrote to his close friend and publisher Fritz Simrock (1837–1901) about the idea of a collection of Mädchenlieder—he had already written the song Mädchenfluch and he saw this as the beginning of a larger project. In the event, Brahms’s various Mädchenlieder were spread between different opus numbers at different times of the composer’s life. After Fritz Simrock’s death, the firm was taken over by his nephew Hans (1861–1910) who, in 1904, conceived the idea of honouring Brahms’s original intention by gathering the Mädchenlieder into a single volume, clearly meant to be performed as a set. It is unlikely that Brahms himself had any say as to the ordering (there is nothing to this effect in any of the surviving letters). The note attached to the published Simrock collection (including a printed facsimile of a part of Brahms’s 1877 letter) was signed simply in the firm’s name—N Simrock GmbH—but it mentions that Brahms had spoken about this project on other occasions, and that it was now a pleasure to see his wishes fulfilled. Simrock was delighted, even if for sheerly commercial reasons, to offer singers a group of songs that might be in demand—sung perhaps alongside Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. We shall probably never know whether the composer himself would have approved of exactly how the songs from different opus numbers were put together, but the would-be cycle remains effective in performance, and it is always possible that Brahms himself had given some verbal guidance, transmitted from Franz to Hans Simrock, as to how it should one day be assembled. There are of course a number of ‘maiden songs’ by this composer that are not found in this particular set. The famous Von ewiger Liebe Op 43 No 1, for example, is only narrowly disqualified as a Mädchenlied because it is not narrated by a girl from beginning to end. The songs that follow here all fit that criterion.

The Op 95 No 6 poem is a fragment—the last two strophes of a four-verse lyric by Paul Heyse entitled In der Bucht. This is printed in the Heyse Gedichte (1872) as part of a sub-section entitled Landschaften mit Staffage (Landscapes with adornments)—in this case referring to a picture of an Italian washergirl, scarcely fifteen and sleepy-eyed at dawn, who relieves the drudgery of her work by singing a song. The verses that follow, though original Heyse, are worthy of his Italienisches Liederbuch translations. Brahms is not interested in the social realism of the picture, or that the girl is exploited and probably unhappy. Instead he takes the poem-within-a-poem on its own terms. Heyse’s washergirl, struggling to keep awake, is clearly unable to go to sleep in the middle of her working day, but Brahms’s postlude here suggests that the singer of this song, having decided against paradise as a viable alternative to earthly love, drops off to sleep again. The theme of someone preferring to remain on earth with the loved one, rather than entering paradise on one’s own, is famously explored in Schubert’s Seligkeit D433. The marking of Behaglich ('contentedly') is self-explanatory. The skill with which a trifle such as this has been assembled is awe-inspiring: the innocent ear perceives a charming tune with a gracious accompaniment, much of it in alternating quavers beneath the hands, but Brahms is powerfully, if unobtrusively, at work with dove-tailing sequences in both voice and piano, one seeming to shadow and answer the other, the art that conceals art. The piano-writing has a marvellous feminine delicacy about it, and the thirds in both hands, treble and bass clef, at ‘O Herzelied, du Ewigkeit!’ clearly represent male–female companionship in an ideal world. ‘If only’ is the theme of this song, sunlit with the good nature of Mediterranean life.